DzinEye

You might have a look at Podium Browser. They have a lot more contemporary and commercial stuff in their catalog. It's made for Sketchup but you can easily import into Chief.

Hey Larry, although it sounds like back-clip somehow resolved your problem... I just had a thought for another easy way to do a side-clipped a room view that could be exported without the clipped information. Just put in some temporary 'room divider' walls where you want your room view clipped.

I wasn’t suggesting anything of the sort. Just pointing out how easy and versatile CAD masks are. I see people fighting those wall elevation cameras all the time to get them to either show or hide something...for no really great reason. CAD masks are just far more flexible and advantageous. But ya, knowing you needed to export to DWG would have been a good piece of information to include as the CAD masks could potentially cause issues there depending on what the end goal was. Then again, they’re just filled polyline masks over there too. I was pretty sure that was Michaels point, but it did come off a little harsh sounding...I figured he'd chime in to rectify. In any regards... I don't think the cad mask would work in this case since you're exporting. At least in my experience you get the lines of the mask AND everything you masked in an export.

I'm not using X12 yet, but the clip feature did not exist in wall elevations in X11 so I don't expect it would be in X12 either, and if it was you'd probably see it like it exists for normal sections. Another way to do what you want if you're exporting would be to create a CAD detail from your room elevation, then clip that as needed.

It should be automatically clipping to your room size, but if you want it clipped even more than that, for 'the same effect' you could simply crop the elevation in your layout.

Sounds like you're saying you essentially want an extra thick wall (24"+) with a window niche in it? If so, then there's a couple of different ways to achieve. Verify that's what you want to do and a process can be explained.

Seems to me that Chief should allow us to create 'stair types' similar to how we can create wall types, that would allow us to have several different types set-up and saved for easy use.

Thank you, appreciate it. I did as you suggested, making that piece of roof under the overhang separate, and it worked halfway. Interestingly enough, the hole in the floor goes away, but the hole in the ceiling drywall directly above remains...which totally confounds me. I guess I can live with that for the time being. Still in middle of design phase.

For architectural dwg's front door facing bottom of page is probably the most common, north facing top second, but there is no truly correct standard according to Architectural Graphics Standards from the research I've done. It is easiest for most, lay-people, clients especially, to read plans with front door facing bottom. But I've found that we drafters tend to use whatever standard the office we first learned in used. Front door facing down doesn't work well when you have a long house that doesn't fit vertically on landscape orientation paper at 1/4" scale. Another factor, is if the drawing set will have Civil Eng. drawings, e.g., grading/drainage or landscape plans. They almost always orient North to top of page, and if you want your plans to be more easily cross-readable it helps to have the same orientation as the site/grading/drainage/landscape plans. The main thing is to just make it clear. FWIW, I always show both a N/S/E/W indicator and Front/Right/Back/Left on Elevations.

Okay... here's the file. I have a camera positioned to view the area I'm referring to. Note the hole in the floor (and in the ceiling drywall in the room above) where I want the breezeway roof to continue under the cantilever. Bonus points: As noted in my last post, the breezeway has some issues. I can't get the beam to drop down. If I put a lower ceiling in the breezeway room then the floor in the bedroom above drops down. My plan was the drop the beam and build a soffit above the beam up to the bottom of the floor above. HabitatDesign_X1.zip

Thx Michael... I def. do plan to send it. This prob. sounds terrible but I'm totally focused on a different project at the moment. It's just that this was stumping me like mad before I went to sleep last night so I sent it out this morning for a hopeful easy answer before I jump back into it. Appreciate if you'll have a look-see when I get it posted later. But FYI.. yes that is a cantilevered floor of a bedroom above and a breezeway below... and there are other things giving me grief on this breezeway so maybe they're tied somehow.

Glenn, when I read the help file info on that setting, I really thought you hit it. Oh well!... it did clean up my breezeway eave though. The odd thing about that setting is that it's only available in the general Roof Defaults not available in the DBX for an individual roof plane, yet 'Help' says that it should only be used in the case like this with an overhanging floor. So how do you only use it in this situation if it's an overall default? It's not doing the trick anyway, but maybe if I play with some other settings now in concert with that setting.

Interesting. Well, I tried it and I'll I got was this new bit of (vaulted ceiling?) sticking through. Then tried Use Soffit Surface, and what I thought was every different permutation of all the different roof and room 'ceiling' settings which did not do anything about the hole. I will probably have to upload my plan at this point I guess. Thank you for trying!

Anyone have an idea of how to extend a roof plane below a cantilevered floor area without causing a hole in the floor and the ceiling above it?

I did not model it, but after you did and then noted how close the slopes were, I figured that had to be more than coincidence. So I went back and looked at the roof plan and to my eye his roof slope arrows look to be exactly the same direction. Until then I had been getting my slope cue from the roof material pattern and did not even notice the slope arrow. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the roof material pattern in the elevations do not match that of the roof plan. Also in the lower elevation the heavy line between material direction appears as a valley enhancing the confusion further. Yep... B would've been the ideal example... none the less, appreciate the process explanation.

Richard, you can do this now with X11 by drawing the stair rail manually. Turn off the rail on the stair DBX, then draw a straight rail in line with the wall, and click on the 'Follow Stairs' box in the railings DBX.

You did something wrong, your file is empty

You didn't zip your plan file, you zipped the jpg file. Ahh...sorry, okay you zipped two different files. What kind of roofing material will the cricket be? There are min. slope requirements for different materials.

Ahaa... one of your secret uses of CDfromV comes to light. Will need to think along these lines more often for other uses

In this particular case, it turns out that it wasn't actually necessary to do that process, but it was very tricky because of the way the OP's drawing changed the roof material on that section of roof. I did not catch it either until Michael did. Still, the operation he shows would be the way to do it if that section of roof actually had a pitch that matched the direction of the roof material.

Not necessarily... looked to me like you put a bit too much meat in that chamfer. As Rob L. said... it'll be mostly a labor cost difference... which can be quite a lot to bring a conc. crew out to the site a second time.

Easy, just figure the laser scan will give you a base that you can trace over in Chief. Basically saving you the time of commuting to the site and doing the measure yourself. Even if you can convert the scan to Chief you'll most likely spend as much time reviewing and making corrections as if you just traced it.

Confusing...You said 24" slab, so I thought you were talking about a mat-slab. Okay, I get it now. You must've shown a two-pour system... pour perimeter first then the slab. Yes, single pour is how you detailed it, unless you want the curb which your two-pour would have provided. You can still form a curb with a mono-pour, but it's a little trickier to do.

I have found that Chief's auto-dormer feature won't reliably build that type of dormer (where the ext. wall continues up from below). Do it manually. There are many tutorials if you search 'manual dormer' in Chief's support/user center. A very basic explanation would be: Build a room inside of the room the dormer is in. Make that room the size of the dormer you want and set that room height to the height you want the dormer to be. Break the main roof plane around the dormer walls and pull back the roof over the dormer 'room' so the dormer walls go through the roof opening to their intended height. Build the roof planes of the dormer. Use the roof joining tool to join the roof planes all together. Select the dormer walls and in the wall DBX select ROOF in the left column, then click on Roof Cuts Wall at Bottom. The dormer room walls should then disappear and you'll have your dormer. Best to watch one of the videos showing how to do this.

That is a ton of concrete. It only really makes sense if the soils report requires mat-slab or requires pier and grade beam foundation. With a mat-slab you use two layers of steel, one near the top one near the bottom. Not cheap, but can be less than a lot of piers... again , really depends on the soils report.